Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the City of Toronto Book Award

“Some of the best historical fiction about Toronto. . . . Home and muse, the city that has ignited Redhill’s imagination will captivate and haunt the imagination of readers of this luminous novel.”
—Vancouver Sun

“Redhill succeeds admirably, evoking the past in its every strangely familiar detail. Toronto is not the only city of whose history it might be said ‘a hint . . . is all we have.’ Consolation shows that, for the ready imagination, a hint may be all that is needed.”
—Montreal Gazette

“Tricky, absorbing. . . . The book is enlivened by lovely tropes for everything from the weather . . . to the oddly animated nature of landfill. . . . A novel whose preoccupations have been nurtured and earned. . . . In Consolation, Redhill proves himself ready to make the fateful nature of photography into a matter of collective destiny, for both a small grieving family and a vast incurious city.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Michael Redhill has written a gift to Toronto. The city, with its imperfect past and present, is central to Consolation, a beautiful work of fiction about life, love and land, and the way people cope with the loss of all three. . . . A novel replete with stunning imagery, ambivalent accolades, true-to-life characters, dialogue that sounds utterly real and moments of literary brilliance.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Consolation's elegance, like Redhill’s many descriptions of old Toronto, is in its architecture, as it moves easily through two interrelated stories. . . . Redhill shows himself a masterful researcher and compiler of details—exactly the kind of writer you need to tell a story of yesterday.”
—The Globe and Mail

“It may be deemed THE novel of Toronto. . . . Vital and fascinating. . . . Redhill’s prose is fluid and evocative. . . . It may not always be the image city fathers could prefer, but it has a fine ring of truth.”
—Edmonton Journal

“A beautiful and dreamy story, gorgeously written and movingly told, about the myriad ways the past lingers just below the surface of the present and inevitably shapes the future. It is the story of a family, but also the story of Toronto, a city that's constantly recreating itself and, in so doing, constantly shrugging off its awkward past. . . . Redhill's recreation of old Toronto is so vivid you can almost hear the rumble of carriage wheels on the cobblestones as you turn the pages.”
—Calgary Herald

"As Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces did, as did Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Redhill's Consolation makes a convincing case for Toronto as a city of note, not simply as a backdrop but protagonist in its own drama."
—Literary Review of Canada